Latest From the Campaign Trail

Mr. Romney held a rally in Pueblo, Colo., on Monday before departing for New York to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting on Tuesday. President Obama is also scheduled to address the meeting after Mr. Romney.
Campaign aides are seeking to shift to a busier schedule in the field, recognizing that Mr. Romney needs more time on the campaign trail if he is to halt what appears to be slowly building momentum, at least in opinion polls, for Mr. Obama, who has taken a small but worrying lead in some swing states after months in which the race had seemed deadlocked.

Assessing Romney’s Chances

Background Mitt Romney is best known for his credentials as a business executive. He served as Massachusetts governor for one term and he has been running for president nearly nonstop since 2007, but his strength as a businessman is an advantage in an election dominated by economic discussions. Mr. Romney is trying to persuade voters that President Obama’s policies have not worked and that he should be elected to complete the nation’s economic recovery.
The room for error for Mr. Romney is narrow. He must win several states that voted Democratic four years ago, particularly a combination of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia and at least one other state. His campaign is also trying to catch up to the president’s team, which has been steadily building an organization for more than a year. He must energize Republicans, while appealing to independent voters, including many of those who supported Mr. Obama last time.

Its black glass exterior soars high above Fifth Avenue, and its gold-tipped revolving doors have spun the likes of Bruce Willis and Anne Hathaway into its waterfall-splashed atrium. But on Election Day, Trump Tower earned a different sort of distinction: a tiny island of Romneyville amid Manhattan’s deep, blue-state sea.

Just when your mailbox is clear of attacks and your television is free of fuzzy and unflattering black-and-white images of career politicians, the political pros have already started manufacturing grist for the elections two years from now.

The duality of Woody Johnson’s life over the last two years was on full display two weeks ago, on a crisp Tuesday night in Boston. As election results started pouring in at Mitt Romney ’s party at the city’s convention center, Johnson sat sending e-mail after e-mail to Jets executives in New Jersey.

A few days after Hurricane Sandy shattered the shores of New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie picked up the phone to take on a different kind of recovery work: taming the Republican Party fury over his effusive embrace of President Obama. On Nov. 3, Mr.

THE biggest winners on Election Day weren’t politicians; they were numbers folks. Computer scientists, behavioral scientists, statisticians and everyone who works with data should be proud. They told us who was going to win, but they also helped to make many of those victories happen.

LAS VEGAS — The polite praise initially showered upon Mitt Romney for having waged a good fight against President Obama has given way to a plea from some Republicans: Please stop talking. A week after the election, as Republicans examine how to recalibrate and regain their footing, Mr.

While President Obama ’s lopsided support among Latino and other minority voters has been a focus of postelection analysis, the overwhelming support he received from another growing demographic group — Americans who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual — has received much less attention. But the backing Mr.

DES MOINES — The days since President Obama won re-election have been marked by tension and angst in Republican-led states like Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad has waited until the last minute to decide whether to create a crucial tool for people to get medical coverage under Mr. Obama’s health care law.

WASHINGTON — As Representative Paul D. Ryan casts about to find an explanation for the defeat of the Republican presidential ticket, on which he was Mitt Romney ’s running mate, he is looking to the nation’s big cities for answers.

WASHINGTON — With both parties positioning for difficult negotiations to avert a fiscal crisis as Congress returns for its lame-duck session, Democrats are latching on to an idea floated by Mitt Romney to raise taxes on the rich through a hard cap on income tax deductions. The proposal by Mr.

MIAMI — President Obama was re-elected Tuesday. Mitt Romney ’s campaign conceded defeat in Florida on Thursday. And a few indefatigable politicians are already planning on making pit stops in Iowa. But in Florida, time stood still — until Saturday.

BOSTON — They predict he will write a book, convinced that the daily diary he kept on the campaign trail would make for a compelling read. They speculate that he will return to the corridors of finance, where his reputation as a savvy chief executive and investor remains unblemished.

FRANKFURT — European citizens and political leaders welcomed President Barack Obama ’s re-election Wednesday. European money was less enthusiastic. Many business executives and investors in Europe, like their counterparts in the United States, would have welcomed a president who was one of their own.

PROVO, Utah — As a Mormon boy, Daniel C. Peterson grew up hearing stories about the persecution of his ancestors, beginning with his great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was chased out of Missouri, then Illinois, before he died trekking across the Great Plains to reach this rugged land.

It was not on any ballot, but one of the biggest election contests this week pitted pundits against pollsters. It was a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and “Spidey sense,” and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers.

At the private air terminal at Logan Airport in Boston early Wednesday, men in unwrinkled suits sank into plush leather chairs as they waited to board Gulfstream jets, trading consolations over Mitt Romney ’s loss the day before.

A couple of decades ago, Prince William County was one of the mostly white, somewhat rural, far-flung suburbs where Republican candidates went to accumulate the votes to win elections in Virginia. Since then, Prince William has been transformed.